AWARENESS OF TIME AND SPACE 



Fannestelle, Manitoba, fifty to sixty miles from their night roost on Lake Man- 

 itoba. These were as precise and direct to the unseen destination as a flight 

 across a small bay. The birds moved just as surely to a field sixty miles away as 

 to the bay edge plainly seen. It is possible to conduct a simple experiment 

 to demonstrate this relation between the past and the present. In four 

 feet of water in Cadham Bay I dumped a bucket of wheat. Within twenty- 

 four hours some ducks had located this grain. Once found, they fed there 

 regularly. They swam directly to this place — a hidden pinpoint in the vast 

 expanse of water — finding it precisely again and again. The grain could not 

 be seen, and so every trip there depended upon an awareness of something 

 beyond sight. 



The bird cannot travel guided by experience alone, of course, and when 

 the landscape is not visible, as in dense fog, local movement comes to a halt. 

 A flock of Canada Geese roosting on Cadham Bay went to their stubble 

 fields when visibility was at about a hundred yards in a light fog ; but when 

 this thickened so that we could see no farther than fifty yards, they did 

 not make their trip and loafed all day on the bay. Peter Scott writes me 

 that his flock of free-winged Greater Snow Geese at the Severn Wildfowl 

 Trust "got up in a fog and couldn't get down." Local aerial activity about 

 the marsh is intense on bright, moonlit nights, but there are few or no 

 waterfowl in the air on nights that are overcast and moonless. 



Let us remember that the size and complexity of a range are relative 

 to the size and age of the bird. Some ducklings spend their first eight or ten 

 weeks on small sloughs and potholes, their total range of activity covering 

 only a few acres at most. Others may spread their early days over many 

 acres, but the span of activity is restricted by the young bird's requirement 

 to swim or walk wherever it goes. However small in extent, the reedy edges 

 and deep beds of emergent vegetation of the first home are complex grounds 

 for the duckling to learn. To such a downy young, Fannestelle, sixty miles 

 away, is far beyond the edge of eternity. Two months later, however, the 

 home pond is only a small corner of this bird's world as it now flies in an 

 oriented manner about the large marsh and adjacent countryside. For the 

 little duckling the patch of reeds is as large and as complex, relatively speak- 

 ing, as the whole wide marsh for the same bird after it has grown its wings 

 and taken flight. 



When ducks take short, low flights, we infer that the topographic 

 features which their travel obeys — the creeks, channels, and other features 

 of the landscape - are their guides to orientation. In going greater distances 



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